Hewlett-Packard this week cut the price of some of its Unix servers by up to 20% in an effort to grab market share from IBM and Sun Microsystems.

The price cuts apply to the rp7405 and rp7410 eight-way servers and the rp8400 16-way server, said Dimitris Dovas, worldwide product line manager for the company's midrange Unix servers. These servers compete with Sun's v880, 3800, 4800, and 6800 servers, as well as IBM's p650 and p670 servers, said Dovas.

IDC's latest server report gives HP a 40% market share in the Unix space, a figure that has grown since last year, Dovas said. "Competitors ... are losing share, so we are doing a proactive cut to increase our share," he said. "We want to move even more aggressively. The competition in the midrange Unix market is very aggressive, even though the market is flat. So the only way for HP to grow here is to take share from the competition."

The driver for the price cuts is improved supply-chain efficiencies that have resulted in CPU price cuts of 5% to 2% , and in cuts in memory prices of 20% to 22%, said Dovas.

In order to improve customers' total cost of ownership, HP has also cut the maintenance cost for these servers by 15%, Dovas said.